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Panic Attacks And The Nurse Who Witnessed Her Son’s Near Death Experience

My son accidentally ingested peanut butter yesterday.  He’s allergic.

He’s done this once before, which is when we found out about the allergy.  He had some really awful hives 3 hours after he ate that small bite of peanut butter sandwich but that was all.  His allergist told me that it would most likely never get worse than that.

He managed to eat some more yesterday.  I braced myself for the hives to come, and we dosed him with Benadryl.  An hour later he vomited.  The pediatrician’s advice nurse advised me to take him to the ER.  At the time I thought it was overkill.  He wasn’t having any breathing difficulties beyond the cough he already had (he has a cold).  He definitely wasn’t acting quite right, though, so off we went. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at code blog - tales of a nurse*

Caring Bridge: Using The Internet To Monitor Your Loved One’s Health/Hospital Status

When Beth found out that her husband had cancer, a friend suggested that she look into creating a page on CaringBridge.org.  As she puts it, “CaringBridge became a tool to help us communicate with others.”

I spoke with Sona Mehring last week, who is the owner of CaringBridge.  The site started as a simple webpage for a friend of Sona’s who was going through a difficult pregnancy.  Sona and her friends used the site to keep friends and family informed of updates, keeping everyone in the loop without having to make several phone calls each day. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at code blog - tales of a nurse*

Dignity And Pain

I took care of an elderly man recently.  He’d been dealing with multiple medical problems for almost 30 years.  Despite being in some very significant pain, he still made eye contact, still said “please” and “thank you.”

He wasn’t faking the pain.  He was very stoic, but I could tell he was hurting.  That tight-lipped grimace, the tachycardia, not moving a muscle unless it was absolutely necessary.  Still, manners prevailed.

My colleagues and I went above and beyond for him and his family.  There’s just something about being polite to others that makes those others want to help you and help you and help you some more.

I’m not saying that we don’t want to help those that aren’t overly polite.  It was just nice to be treated, well, so nicely.  I wouldn’t expect everyone in severe pain to maintain such decorum.  Every once in awhile you just click with a patient and it makes being a nurse so enjoyable. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at code blog - tales of a nurse*

When Your Significant Other Overrides Your Living Will

He knew she was angry with him.

“Whenever I come to see her, I reach out and take her hand, but she looks away.”

Husband and wife for well over 50 years, they had been through a lot.  They met in another country in another time, and to hear him tell it, it almost seemed fated that they’d end up together.  Since then, they’d moved many times, raised a family, supported each other through myriad illnesses.  They were growing old together.

Unfortunately, “growing old together” doesn’t always work out like we hope it will.  Diseases and illnesses ravage our bodies; dementia ravages our brains.  She’d long ago given up on their little garden in the backyard.  It was her favorite hobby, but she couldn’t manage it anymore. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at code blog - tales of a nurse*

Nursing Student Expelled For Blogging

When University of Louisville nursing student Nina Yoder blogged about her experience watching a patient give birth in a post entitled “How I Witnessed the Miracle of Life,” she may have thought she was just blowing off some steam. Well her school saw things very differently.

When school officials read Yoder’s post, which included a description of the baby as a “creep” and “a wrinkly, bluish creature, all Picasso-like and weird, ugly as hell, covered in god knows what, screeching and waving its tentacles in the air,” they moved to expel her from school by calling her into an office, searching her for weapons (apparently because Yoder had separately blogged about her support for the Second Amendment), and informing her she was no longer enrolled at the school. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at code blog - tales of a nurse*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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